


The Esteem of Cats

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Ancient Egyptian Deities, Cats, Fix-It, M/M, Spoilers for Legends Season 1, Variations on Ancient Egyptian Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 05:32:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9420776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: “Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”(Leonard Snart is a cat person - and the Egyptian cat goddess Bastet notices)





	

Len’s always liked cats. When they’re nice, they’re the friendliest creatures he’s ever met; when they’re not, they’re assholes, and he can respect that. He's an asshole too, the majority of the time. You just have to respect them and understand them as far as you can, and accept what you can’t understand, because they’re innately unknowable. 

When he breaks into the rich man’s house in Nepal – the one in the city, where he brings guests he wants to charm, not the creepy lonely mountain path that he goes up on a regular basis and which Len’s instincts had told him not to follow – he finds a bunch of old antiquities, and a cat.

The cat is lounging, as cats do, around a statute of a cat-headed goddess. It’s a pretty statute: sand-colored stone and two pretty gems in the eyes, one green, one blue. It’s a pretty cat, too: slick gold fur, lightly spotted, and long tail swishing back and forth. 

“Hey, gorgeous,” Len says, dropping down and offering his hand politely – he wouldn’t pet a strange cat without it indicating that it approved; he likes his hand in one place. “Hope you’re not a guard cat; I need this job to go off smooth, or the people behind it might hurt my partner.”

The cat, which had strange, mismatched eyes, one green and one almost human-blue, looks at him for a long moment, then finally inclines its head to the side and purrs.

Approval given, Len gives the cat a few long strokes, marveling at how soft she is, then he gets up and goes to collect the items he was told to get.

And a few extra, of course; it’s only fair.

“What do you think?” he asks the cat, gesturing between two equally ugly gold statutes. “Fat man with grapes or baby with a harp?”

The cat stretches long and lithe, and gets up lazily, wandering over. She studies the two statutes before placing a paw on the one with the harp.

“Harp it is,” Len says agreeably. He’s just going to sell them anyway. “That’s my baby sister’s skating instructor paid for,” he tells the cat, who purrs approvingly. “And this –” he plucks a crappy looking diamond necklace from a pile of similar looking ones, “– is what my partner’s going to use to make us dinner for the rest of the year.”

The cat huffs, and it sounds almost like a laugh.

“No, really!” Len protests, smiling a little. He liked talking on jobs; he keeps trying to break the habit, but he hasn’t quite gotten there yet. He usually has Mick there so he can pretend he's actually talking to someone who's listening, but honestly, Mick probably only actually bothers listening about as much as this cat is. “I eat like crap, my cooking’s worse, but he’s great. Anyone – any _thing_ – that eats his cooking, he likes. I’d offer you some, but, hey, he’s currently being held prisoner, which is the only reason I’m even _doing_ this stupid job.”

The cat hums approvingly.

Len finishes collecting the items and bids the cat farewell, even though it follows him at least until the doorway, rubbing its head against some weird carvings against the frame there. 

He doesn’t remember taking the cat-headed statute with him, but he finds it tucked into his pocket when he gets back to his hotel. 

He considers selling it along with the rest of the extras he took, but he decides not to. It’s small, made of stone. The only thing worth anything are the gemstones, and they don’t look like emeralds or sapphires or anything all that. Besides, he likes the look of it, and he’s never really appreciated art for its own sake before.

So he keeps it.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mick always found it funny that Len never seems to notice the cats.

Oh, Len loves cats; it’s probably the most badly hidden fact about him. He’ll devote hours to petting them, figuring out where each cat likes it best and working his hands until they’re sore and the cat is a puddle of feline happiness, but never going overboard and pulling away as soon as the cat indicates they’re no longer in the mood. He respects them and he likes them and he has _no idea_ about them.

Specifically, that there’s a positive _battalion_ of cats that live in their safehouses.

Len seems content to just pet each cat that walks by, lets them curl through his feet, uses them as living paperweights for his blueprints. As far as Len’s concerned, they just wander in and out as they please, which is true.

Mick is the one who feeds them. 

He sets out the litterboxes outside – the cats all behave quite well, which never ceases to surprise him, given that a good three-fourths of them are definitely wild – and he puts out the water for them and he makes sure they all have plenty of spare furniture to tear into. Most of all, though, he feeds them. He’s always liked it when his cooking is enjoyed, and the cats all line up like nobody’s business.

They love him very nearly as much as they love Len, he thinks. 

Never as much as Len. Len is like _catnip_ to them.

Mick estimates they own – and by own he means that he will put in the effort to take them to yearly check-ups at the vet, put their kittens in carriers when Len and him are moving because they’ll have trouble keeping up otherwise, and occasionally see that they get adopted with a nice family, as opposed to the truly wild ones that refuse the pleasure – as many as fifteen right now, not counting kittens.

Kittens never count. 

Honestly, Mick’s not sure when they started showing up, but they did, and now he’s given them all nicknames and he will torch anyone who lays a finger on them the wrong way. He never thought of himself as an animal-lover before. 

There’s one in particular that Mick likes: a sandy Egyptian Mau, female, adult though he’s not sure how old, gorgeous gold-bronze spotted fur and mismatched eyes. She’s got the bearing of a queen and the other cats fall over themselves to come over to purr at her. She’s the alpha cat of the house, no doubt about it.

She’s quite fond of Len – twines herself around his feet quite often, sometimes permitting him to lift her to his lap, often not – and she seems to be letting Mick grow on her. Lisa’s currently under probation due to an unfortunate ear-pulling incident that occurred when Lisa was still young, but Len gave Lisa a whole lecture and demonstration, and Lisa’s been doing much better now. Cat's still a bit suspicious of her, though.

Mick calls her Bastet, based on her fondness for the statute of the cat-headed goddess Len keeps carting around everywhere. They’ve got similar eyes. 

“How _is_ he so oblivious to all you cats?” he complains to her lightly, not really meaning it. She’s got a wise gaze; he sometimes almost feels like she understands him. Either way, she makes a great set of ears to whine to. “You think he’d know by now. Though given that he hasn’t noticed my thing for him yet, either, so I guess I don’t mind him being so dense…”

The cats end up surrounding them three days later, meowing frantically until the two of them notice there’s a spring of mistletoe that Mick _totally_ didn’t put there in hope of winning a Christmas kiss from his Jewish partner.

Mick flushes. “Cats,” he says helplessly.

Len flushes a bit, too. “Can’t say I’d mind,” he says, averting his eyes.

Mick draws him in, and forgets about the cats.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Len doesn’t know how Mick kept the cats fed. He did feed them, right? Or did they just wander in?

He has _no idea_. He never paid attention; Mick as always the one who cooked.

Mick’s not here right now.

Mick’s –

Mick’s not going to be here ever again, because Len _left him_. Len’s a terrible partner, and no matter how cold he tells himself he has to be, how much he tries to ice over his heart and say no: I can’t put up with nearly losing him to the flames, not again, _never again_ , I just can’t, it doesn’t work. He just can't convince himself of what he knows to be true, which is that he’s a terrible partner. 

He’s a terrible cat-keeper, too. 

Hell, how are there so many? Where did they even come from?!

“I’m sorry,” he says to the cats, dropping his head into his hands. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. I don’t – Mick’s _gone_ , he’s in the hospital, I broke him out of the ambulance and got him to a clinic where they won't arrest him, but I’ve _left him_ , so he's not coming back and he's not going to feed you and I swear I’ll do my best, but I just – I don’t know.”

The cats gather around him and purr forgivingly. 

“I just don’t know what I’m going to do without him,” Len says.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Mick wakes up in the crappy hospital clinic bed – really wakes up, not the half-consciousness that he’s been drifting in and out of recently – there’s a cat on his knee.

It’s Bastet.

She’s licking a paw delicately.

“I fucked this one up, didn’t I?” he asks, resigned. He doesn’t remember much after the fire – it was mostly pain – but he remembers Len breaking him out of that ambulance, getting him here, remembers Len telling him they were through with ice in his voice and tears in his eyes.

She purrs in agreement.

“He’s never going to come back,” Mick says, trying to make himself face up to it. No more Len. No more safehouses filled with cats that love him; no more Len petting five cats in a row without seeming to notice that they’d replaced each other; no more Len fast asleep on the couch with a half-dozen kittens using him as a bed; no more telling Len that he needs to eat as a good example for the cats; _no more Len_. “He’s gone. It’s my fault.”

Bastet lightly hops onto his belly, which makes Mick hiss; he’s still a bit tender, even with the painkillers.

She pads up and looks down at him.

“And there’s no reason for him to come back, anyway,” Mick continues. His attempts at steeling himself have shifted to self-pity, he knows it, but he can't seem to stop himself. He's gotten too used to spilling his guts to the cat. “The docs said it's third degree burns, most of 'em. Over a third of me, burned away; they say there’s probably be infections, and scarring, and I’ll probably never be able to move my arms right again. I’ll just be dead weight for him now. Don't see why he would come back, anyway, even if he was stupid enough to agree to.”

She stares into his eyes.

“You think he might forgive me, one day?” Mick asks hopelessly. “I don’t even care about the rest; that’s on me, my fire, my fault. I should’ve left sooner. But Len – do you think?”

She dips her head down and touches her nose to his.

He finds himself falling asleep again, a clean and easy sleep, sleep undisturbed by nightmares. 

When he wakes up, Bastet is long gone, and the doctors tell him – not without a tone of some puzzlement – that he’s expected to make a full recovery. Scars a-plenty, sure, and some deadening of the nerve endings, but no impact on his mobility or strength, and no sign of any lingering disease.

Mick takes the win and gets out of there.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Len rubs under the cat’s chin, just the way she likes it.

“Wouldn’t have pegged you for a cat person,” Sara says. 

“They’re usually assholes,” Len says. “I empathize with my people.”

She barks a laugh, surprised. “You own any?” she asks, nodding the lovely Egyptian Mau that Len is petting, the one eyeing Sara with a suspicious look.

“Nah,” Len says. “Cats don’t really let you own them. They wander in and out of our houses, sometimes.”

“You and Mick?” Sara asks.

“Yeah,” Len replies, shaking his head in fond memory. “You should’ve seen how much trouble we had getting them to understand that the cold and heat guns weren’t new cat toys we bought just for them.”

(or getting out of the bedroom long enough for him and Mick to reunite _properly_ , as husbands long separated by their own stupidity ought to; now _that_ had been an uphill battle – for some reason, the cats seemed to feel like they were entitled to be a part of the ongoing celebrations)

“I was always more of a dog person,” Sara says with a shrug, going to sit down on one of the chairs in the galley.

The cat curled in that chair hisses at her and she jumps right back up before she sits on him.

Len sniggers. 

He can’t help it.

Sara gives him a dirty look, but apparently she can’t stay angry at a man with a kitten on his head – there are three in the hood of his parka, and a one brave one has managed to scale up his ears to cling tenuously to his skull with tiny little paws that barely prick the surface of his skin even when they dig in – and her look of annoyance fades. 

“Gives you some character, the cats,” she says, nodding at them. 

Len snorts. “By which you mean, you think if I pet cats I’m not as evil as I come off?” he drawls. “That’s Hollywood for you.”

“It’s the kittens,” she says with a shrug. “Girls are a sucker for kittens.”

“I don’t know if that’s true for everyone on board this ship. Don't hawks eat kittens?” he observes.

She laughs.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rip has _no idea_ how these cats got onto the Waverider. If only he could figure out _when_ they were from, he could return them, but he doesn’t want to risk transmitting some sort of cat plague to the past or to the future.

Better to just let the crew think they came with the ship. 

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There’s a cat on his cot.

Kronos is pretty sure that’s against regulations.

He should probably mention it to someone, but, well, it’s a _cat_. It's hardly dangerous or any cause for worrying. He doesn’t want the other Bounty Hunters to think he’s gone nuts or something, complaining about a cat in his quarters; it’s probably one of the Time Masters’ pets gotten loose, and they'll be pissed off if he so much as twitches the wrong way in its directions and then he'll really be in for it. The Bounty Hunters are pretty low on the Time Masters' list of priorities. 

Besides, the other Bounty Hunters are as consumed with unending rage as he is. Someone might hurt the cat, and Kronos –

Kronos would be annoyed by that.

He goes to let the servants – mechanical drones, mind-wiped humans – remove his armor and dismisses them, turning back to the cot.

Cat’s still there.

Pretty cat, actually. Spotted, gold, interesting eyes.

Pretty as a statute.

Len’s statute.

Kronos gasps as if he’s been punched in the stomach, his eyes sliding shut as the memories flood back in.

He’d forgotten.

How had he forgotten?

Len –

Len had _left him_.

For the fucking _team_ of fucking _heroes_.

Rage lights up in his stomach, but not the general, formless, empty rage of the majority of the Bounty Hunters. Oh, no.

This rage is focused, laser-sharp, on his partner.

He's going to find him, Kronos is, and when he finds him, he's going to -

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Sorry, Bastet. I guess I’m kind of a bastard sometimes.”

Len blinks a little, frowning at the empty space in his arms where his partner ought to be.

His partner, who is currently talking to the cat sitting on the desk.

“Mick,” he groans into the pillow. “Stop talking to the cat and come back to bed.”

“I need to get the pills Gideon prescribed for you,” Mick says. “You’ll start feeling that face if I don’t.”

“It’s fine,” Len lies, even though his everything is starting to really hurt. He’s getting to old to be beaten as badly as that. His face is sore, his joints are stiff, his muscles all over are locking up and spasming…maybe he could do with some pills.

But he’ll go to hell twice over to get Mick back into his arms, and damnit, that’s what he wants right now, not pills.

Mick comes with pills anyway, and a nice warm washcloth, and that helps. 

“I’m sorry,” Len says. It’s not the first time he’s said it; it’s been something of a refrain. He'd never say it in public, but he was always more touchy-feely after getting laid. He swallows the pills obediently. 

“Tell your cats not to eat my liver when I’m asleep in payback,” Mick replies, carefully running the washcloth over Len’s bruises. 

Len snorts and wraps his arms around Mick’s waist. “This one’s all mine, pretty,” he tells the cats. There’s the Egyptian Mau, of course; two tabbies and a black cat, and of course the speckled kittens that have been training themselves to climb things this last two weeks. “Leave him alone. I’ll make sure he’s appropriately punished.”

Mick snorts. “You’re a pushover.”

“I am _not_.”

“When it comes to cats, or me? What do you call it, then?”

“Good taste,” Len declares.

The cats purr approvingly.

Mick glances at them, then away. 

“It’s disturbing,” he says. “The kittens are just two weeks older, and it’s been so much longer for me.”

“Trust the cats, not your brain,” Len says. He’s comfortable now, the pain starting to fade away again. And Mick’s here. He’s missed Mick. “Forget the rest.”

“You know, I think I’ll do that,” Mick says. “You sure you don’t want to go heal up the bruises?”

“I’m sure,” Len says firmly.

They’re the price he paid for Mick. He’ll wear them gladly.

The cat Mick called Bastet jumps onto the bed and curls around Len’s feet. 

He thinks, in the moment before he falls asleep, that she approves of his decision.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Len is fast asleep on the big, warm pillow. He’s got the best spot in the whole place – right in the sunbeam – and he’s not moving for _anything_.

“My child,” a warm voice says.

Okay. 

Maybe for Her.

_Maybe_.

Len cracks open an eye.

The woman’s skin is dark bronze, an inhuman gold so deep in color that it makes him think of rust and ancient coins, and splattered with freckles, which are the only thing that keeps her from looking like a statute come to life. Her clothing is white and her glittering necklace heavy around her neck; her eyes are mismatched, green and blue.

Len purrs for her. 

“My child,” she says again. “I am here to take you home.”

Well, that’s certainly not going to happen. Does she know the _pain in the ass_ it was to _get_ here in the first place?

“Yes,” she says, amused. “I particularly enjoyed your attempt to _debate_ with Ma’at regarding the weighing of your soul. Not to mention your attempts at arguing that Jews get a free pass since you are not technically subject to our religion...”

Hey, he made it in the end.

“Barely, my child.”

Doesn’t count how close the lion’s jaws are to closing on your tail, as long as he catches nothing but fluff in his teeth.

She laughs. Her teeth are white. 

“My child, my beloved child,” she says. “You do not need to go home. You can stay here forever.”

Contrary in the way of all of his kind, that’s what gets Len to get up onto his paw and flick his tail at her, asking for more details. 

“Mick needs you,” she says.

Mick! 

Of course Mick needs him. 

…couldn’t Mick come here, where it’s warm and comfortable? Len would totally share his pillow, if it was with Mick. Even the catnip. (Catnip is amazing.)

“He is hastening his own journey,” she says. “His heart is broken, and does not heal. If you do not come home now, he will be here soon – far, far too soon.”

Len’s not going to let _that_ happen. Not on his watch, not to his Mick, no sir.

“I thought you’d see it that way,” she says, amused, and gathers him into her arms.

“Be glad,” she advises him. “Very few get second chances like this. Use it well!”

Len purrs.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I have no idea where your catgirl statute went,” Mick says apologetically. “It’s like one day it was there, and the next day it wasn’t.”

“It’s fine,” Len assures him. “I ain’t angry or nothing. It’s just a statute. And it wasn't a catgirl! It just, you know, had a cat head.”

“Yeah, but it was your favorite –”

“ _You’re_ my favorite,” Len says, just because it makes Mick flush with pleasure if Len says anything even remotely favorable about him, and also because it makes Mick come over and kiss him, and that’s where Len wants him to be right now. “Relax about the statute, Mick. We still have all the cats, don’t we? Surely that’s enough.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Mick says, laughing. “But Len –”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe next time, share the catnip _with_ the cats?”

“Gimme a break,” Len protests. “It smelled really good!”

“Len…”

“Don’t you ‘Len’ me.”

“Let the cats have their catnip.”

“I was never good at sharing.”

“If we put the catnip outside, the cats will all go there, and we’ll have the bedroom to ourselves.”

“On the other hand, I _can_ be convinced…”


End file.
